Description:

Lisa Lehmann, MD, PhD
Associate Professor of Medicine and Medical Ethics, Harvard
Director, Center for Bioethics, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Moral Courage in Medicine: Measuring and Cultivating It

Health care providers commonly face situations that call for moral courage including delivering care to an infectious patient, meeting an angry patient or family member, addressing an incompetent or impaired colleague, or disclosure of a medical error. In all of these circumstances, we may be confronted with the challenge of a trade off between doing what is right for patients and our own self-interest. Dr. Lehmann will discuss a novel scale to measure moral courage and strategies for cultivating it. The concept is particularly relevant to physicians in training who, due to the medical hierarchy and concerns about the impact of evaluations on future career options, may feel especially constrained from acting in accordance with their ethical convictions.